Democracy Goes for Its Guns

Eight days after the massacre of 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary, where each child was shot with a Bushmaster .223, The Nation’s Gun Show, the biggest east of the Mississippi, opened.

“A line already snaked around the building shortly after the three-day event began at 3 p.m., and the parking lot was jammed” at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Va., wrote Justin Jouvenal of the Washington Post:

With an AK-47 slung over one shoulder, Marco Hernandez offered one word when asked why he was in the overflow crowd at the gun show…

“Obama,” he said… “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the possible gun ban.”

And this is the story across America since Sandy Hook.

The weapon most in demand at Chantilly?

The AR-15 black rifle, a version of which was used to slaughter the innocents in Newtown. At Chantilly, their price doubled in hours to $1,800. Gun stores have sold out their inventory.

Yet for weeks after Sandy Hook, journalists and politicians from the president to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who were making the case for a new assault weapons ban, dominated the airwaves. Those calling for reinstatement of the ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 had the national audience almost entirely to themselves.

The National Rifle Association was largely silent. Not until nine days after Newtown did the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre appear on “Meet the Press” to be subjected to hostile interrogation.

Yet, from the record gun sales in December, and 2012 — there were 16.8 million calls to the FBI for background checks for gun purchases last year — the elites have lost the argument with the audience that counts.

They have failed to convince those who buy guns.

Just as East Berliners, before the Wall was built, voted with their feet, fleeing west, Americans are voting with their checkbooks, paying hundreds and thousands of dollars to buy the guns liberals loathe.

The reflexive response of the gun controllers is to blame this on that malevolent force, the gun lobby, at whose apex is the NRA.

But those crowds coming to gun shows in droves and buying semi-automatics are not there because the NRA issued some order.

Today, we Americans are a far more heavily armed people than half a century ago. Forty-seven percent of adult males own a firearm. There are 270 million rifles, shotguns and pistols in private hands.

Are they for hunting? Not according to the Financial Times.

“The number of hunters fell from 16.6 million in 1975 to 12.5 million in 2006, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.” That number will continue to shrink as America’s suburbs further encroach on rural areas, limiting hunting grounds and reducing game.

The FT notes that Freedom Group, owner of Bushmaster, has estimated that while “total sales of long guns to U.S. consumers rose at an annual rate of just 3 percent during 2007-2011, modern sporting rifles grew at an annual rate of 27 percent.” Last year, sporting rifle sales doubled.

The number of rifles like the AR-15 in private hands has probably tripled since the assault weapons ban expired. The NRA’s David Keene estimates the number now at above 3 million.

Who owns these weapons?

Half are owned by veterans and cops. Writes Keene: “Nearly 90 percent of those who own an AR-15 use it for recreational target shooting; 51 percent of AR owners are members of shooting clubs and visit the range regularly; the typical AR owner is not a crazed teenage psychopath, but a 35-plus-year-old, married and has some college education.”

These figures suggest that a successful effort to restrict the sale and transfer of “assault rifles” will, as did the Volstead Act and Prohibition, drive the market underground, create lawbreakers out of folks who are law-abiding and send the AR-15 price further skyward.

Many gun controllers not only do not understand what motivates those who disagree with them, they do not like them, reflexively calling them gun nuts, a reaction as foolish as it is arrogant and bigoted.

For given the loosening of gun laws at the state level in recent years, the gun controllers no longer have the numbers to impose their will on the folks who have a love for, or feel a need for, guns.

To most Americans, an armed guard in a school is a good idea in our too-violent nation. Most Americans realize that when shooting breaks out in a gun-free zone — a school, movie theater, mall — the first call goes to 911 to get cops with Glocks and a SWAT team with black rifles there as soon as possible.

Most folks understand why air marshals on planes might have to be armed. Most folks know that the people running up the death toll in murder capitals like Chicago are not using AR-15s. And many Americans yet accept that in the last analysis it is a man’s duty to be the defender and protector of his wife and children.

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21 Responses to Democracy Goes for Its Guns

The pundits are saying that the Beltway lacks a spirit of compromise. Not to worry, here is my suggestion to unite the left and right. Since we are offering comprehensive sex education in our elementary school classrooms, I propose that we include gay and transgender education. In exchange, we could teach all the kids the proper way to handle and fire guns including M-16’s and other assault weapons. This way everyone benefits!

I think a lot of opposition to gun control comes from the knowledge of mass atrocities on most of the continents on the globe during the past century. Millions starved to death or executed in China, Soviet Russia,, North Korea, Cambodia, Africa … the list goes on and on.
A lot of folks feel that allowing the state to monopolize firearms places us in a very vulnerable position. I know this is the main reason for my opposition to gun control, although I suppose some gc is needed.

I live in Fairfax, a stones throw away from Chantilly, and I go to the Gun show almost every quarter when they have it; but this is the first one that I felt was something special. Early in the day there were protestors but they moved on, honestly they are protesting the wrong crowd, most of the guys and gals in line just laughed at them or thought they were ridiculous. The place itself was indeed packed, probably double if not triple the normal amount of people there and though normally some people open carry into the building that number is usually pretty small, this time it was a bit larger, people were making statements.

One thing that anyone who goes to these shows will notice is that where normally there is an ebb and flow to things, shop owners talk with customers, prices can be haggled a bit if you know your stuff, you can find little gems that go unnoticed; this time there was a sense of urgency, like this may be one of the last gun shows. People were not there to look, they were there to buy, and buy they did, at crazy prices too. I was looking personally for the Sig Sauer P229 .40 caliber pistol but after I saw the people and prices I decided to buy it where I knew I could get it at a lower price.

As for the crazy rush on the AR-15s, let me first start off with saying I’m probably not going to buy one. In the situations I may find myself I think it is unnecessary, and for my budget it would be a very expensive range weapon. But what I will say is that the idea of average citizens owning the weapon does not scare me, if you talk to most folks at a gun show and more specifically the people buying the guns you will find that most of them have normal 9-5s and want to go to a range and shoot with the guys. I will not argue that the AR-15 is a weapon designed to kill people, it is, but what I will argue is that pistols have the same purpose yet no one talks of banning them. I will own my pistol soon enough, and in the state of Virginia it is legal to conceal carry when I permit is obtained, I might or might not do this but I like to have the option.

My personal opinion on the matter is that as with other issues in the country where people just want to live their lives, I do not want to regulate things further than they already are. I do not like the idea that because some psycho killed innocent people, that essentially I am guilty by association, that is broken logic in a nation that hates to be judged and wants tolerance from everyone on certain subjects. Those who want to have a serious discussion about guns should show those who they disagree with a modicum of respect, civility, and realize that by virtue of your anti-gun opinion you are not automatically correct. And the same goes for me, I am comfortable with guns, but I respect the fact that others are not, it is when people want absolutes that the conversation goes out the window and the yelling starts. Sadly that is about where the political discussion on things is now.

Whatever reason there was for adding the 2nd amendment, I’m pretty sure the debate by the founders wasn’t about hunting. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone say, “Well, rifles for hunting are perfectly okay, but beyond that…” The ‘beyond that’ part is precisely when the 2nd amendment protections begin to really become relevant.

My great grandmother, a retired US obstetrician, had a nice home in the Sudatanland, Checkoslovackia in 1938. Her property was confiscated and she was sent to “serve” seven years in the concentration camps in Poland. She was freed in 1945 by Gregory Zukof’s 1st Ukranian Army fresh from Stalingrad only to walk “home” to poverty trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

As a boy I often saw Ismet Innonou, Ottoman commander in Syria who handled the “final solution” of the Armenians.
Hitler’s comment to the Wantasee Conference was “Who remembers the Armenians”.

All human beings have a right to self-defense and self-preservation, and the right to defend their lives and families’ lives from the aggression of others. It doesn’t matter who those others are, or what kind of artificial authority or officialdom they might have.

The American Revolutionaries could not have had their revolution had their means of defense been inferior to those of the British.

I do not believe in banning guns or assault weapons. That is clearly a non-starter.

But I must point out that there was an armed guard at Columbine, that Virginia Tech has their own armed police force, and that Ft Benning is a military installation. The latter of course was not a slaughter of children, but still illustrates what can be done with high capacity, high rate of fire, and antipersonnel ordance within the first one or two minutes of any event.

The idea that armed guards in more schools would somehow shut down the effectiveness of a shooter armed like this, so quickly as to limit the death toll to less than what we have seen, is not based in reality.

I also suspect that the threat of armed guards is not a deterrent to anyone who undertakes such an attack since they kill themselves as often as not.

I don’t know what the solution is, but both sides just digging lines in the sand only makes lines in the sand.

I love how liberals read the Constitution as broadly as possible to ensure no limitations on fundamental rights not even mentioned in the Constitution, but when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms–a fundamental right that is explicitly protected and set forth in an amendment all by itself, immediately after the right to free speech and peaceably assembly–they want to read it narrowly or out of the document entirely. Amazing.

In the three weeks since Newtown, 643 more Americans have been killed by guns. They all had names. They were all loved by someone.

Let me ask the gun absolutists this: if you were in a hypothetical situation where you had to choose between giving up your gun, or watching an innocent person be murdered, would you give up your gun? Or would you tell the killer to go ahead and pull the trigger, because that person’s life is ultimately worth less than your absolute liberty?

I sorely wish there was a choice to uphold Second Amendment rights, while personally relinquishing all thought of violence as being somehow redemptive, whatever the situation.

Banishing private gun ownership by the coercive power of the state doesn’t produce any change of heart. Only the free choice to be non-violent does.

It’s easier to abdicate responsibility to the state, than be responsible, oneself, through one’s own choices. The freedom to do so, demands that the choice to own a firearm, must always rest with the individual, not top-down dominating authoritarianism. This is the only moral choice, even if imperfect and difficult.

The 2nd amendment was probably written with the intention of allowing the government to raise a militia based army if attacked by a foreign power (England, France, Spain) because it probably did not envision having a permanent big army ready at all times for defense – much too costly for a young nation already in debt. Other countries through history relied on popular armies for defense. In historical times, the people had their swords, axes, bows at home, but in our times, the state usually holds the key to the armory. In my place of origin I’ve seen an entire town of 20,000 armed to the teeth in six hours during a military exercise.

There seems to be no western nation more distrustful of their government as the citizens of the US. It is very twisted indeed, especially when you see that the peonage into which Americans are brought into is through financial tricks and ideological propaganda. To fight that one doesn’t need weapons.

I’m not what anyone would call a sovergn citizen, but I’m getting close. I have an ancestor who signed the declaration of independence, and another who paid someone to fight in the civil war for him, our family has had many exchanges about the primacy of the state vs the individual. I am a libertarian.

I believe that if every Jew in 1936 had taken just one Nazi to the grave, the holocaust would not have occurred.

Mr. Lencar,
I should be surprised if Americans are more distrustful of their government than are the Russians, but, be that as it may, there really is nothing twisted about our mistrust. For there is much more to the proletarianization of Americans, as Pat Buchanan has called it, than “financial tricks and ideological propaganda.”

We now have a government that has assumed the power to kill U. S. citizens without arrest or trial; to wage war without the people’s consent; to seize private property for redistribution to the politically connected; to force children to take mind-altering drugs or be expelled from government schools; and to incorporate into U. S. law the values and legal principles of foreign countries and world governing bodies, without passing through our legislative process, to cite only some of the most glaring examples. To fight this kind of power, guns, even though civilians have much less firepower than government, are the only credible means.

BTW, the American tradition of government support for civilian gun ownership was also based upon the understanding that it was the responsibility of every head of family to help preserve public order, something that would go a long way toward preventing massacres such as we’ve just had. What country is it that is so quickly armed for military exercise?

Floyd Ferris, a bureaucrat in the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:
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Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.

One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone?

But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers.
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Probable cause? We don’t need no steenking probable cause. There are enough laws that you are always breaking some of them.

Is the government a rational, moderate force? Are the administrators reasonable men who understand that they should limit their own power?EPA Official explains its “crucify” enforcement policy
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[edited] In a 2010 video, EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz explained his “philosophy of enforcement” to his staff, which he acknowledged being crude and perhaps inappropriate, but shared anyway: ”It is kind of like how the Romans conquered villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a Turkish town, find the first five guys, and crucify ‘em. That little town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

“You make examples out of people who are not complying with the law. You hit ‘em as hard as you can. There’s a deterrent effect. And companies that are smart see that. They decide that it’s time to clean up. And that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples.”
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This might be excused if the EPA were enforcing a few laws with clearly beneficial results. But, this is the EPA enforcing thousands of vague laws, most with imperceptible results and huge fines.

President George Washington:
• Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
• Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance. They are the teeth of the people’s liberty.

@Carl. What an utterly absurd false dilemma (go study a bit of elementary logic, and especially concentrate on fallacies).

I would not tell the (about to be) killer anything; I would simply (if at all possible) drop her or him with a single deadly shot so that the innocent person(s) might remained unharmed, and myself also.

So that nobody labels me “liberal” or “un-American”, understand I’ve been wanting to buy either a Walther PPK or Luger pistol for years. I have yet to make the purchase. For many years, when assessing threats to my home and family, I concluded the threat of tragedy from having both a gun and an emotionally-disturbed child in the house was greater than the need for protection from an unlikely home invasion, or less likely agents from an oppressive government. The now-adult child is no longer living at home, but the purchase is still on hold. Until I can devote time to get proper training in handling the weapon. Without ever handling a gun before, I’m probably more of a danger owning a weapon at this point than not.

Against this backdrop, I’ll get to my point. I’m concerned that since we’re unwilling or unable to implement controls to keep guns out of the hands of criminals or the insane, we may inadvertently create the kind of society we’re trying to avoid. To counteract an absolutist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, we may wind up going to the other extreme in expanding our Security State. We’re already discussing armed security in every school. Do we want armed officers in every theater, mall, or other public place? Just think what America would look like. A police state is still a police state even if the intentions were good in creating it.

If you think it can’t happen, it already has. Look at our reaction to 9/11. We’ve spent billions to suffer the indignity of having to submit to searches and full-body scans just to board a plane. We’ve become afraid of our own shadows. Then there’s the human and financial costs of the “war on terror”. It all makes me wonder if the terrorists did achieve their objectives after all.

We seem to excel at placing ourselves in the world of unintended consequences. I fear we’re doing it again.

I would like to be persuaded by your arguments, but what I can see is a country with low levels of trust and loss of basic common sense.

The country that I was talking about is Romania. The necessity to field very rapidly an army from reserves was due to the historical reasons, with only the Black Sea as a friendly neighbor – Soviet Russia was considered the biggest enemy. And also Romanian experience shows that one doesn’t need an armed citizenry in order to overthrow a dictatorial regime…

may,
You link to and copy the claims of “Daily Mail Reporter”. He gives these “citations” for his facts:

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Report comes from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine

A new report reveals that of the 17 wealthiest countries, American males have the lowest life expectancy of 75.6 years and their female counterparts are the second lowest in the rankings coming in at 80.7 years.

The researchers say …
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That is it. So, what report is that? I don’t know, and “Daily Mail Reporter” doesn’t say. We might think that he/she/it would take the time to give a proper citation and the names of the researchers. Without the cite, a complicated set of statistics like this is rubbish.

But, look here for an analysis of gun statistics provided by anti-gun organizations. More guns are related to less crime and provide both public and private self-defense.

Since it is now a widely known fact that the AR-15 was not used in the Sandy Hook affair– the author should amend his article to reflect the truth. It was not used- it sat harmlessly in the back ( trunk ) of the car. Sorry..

The biggest problem is that our lawmakers often have a hidden agenda, especially when it comes to “gun control”. It’s just like everything else– there’s the public face that they put on- where they attempt to convince us that this and that is evil- and we need to do this or that, and the other face– that has their own goals for their own twisted reasoning. The second amendment is really meant as a way to deal with a tyrannical government that has ulterior motives– motives against their own people. In my opinion, some of our own government leaders are actually traitors to their own people– a number of them. In some ways, the recent splurge in gun purchases shows the lack of faith our citizens have in their government- lack of faith that they will do things in the interests of Americans.

The sad thing is the tragedy– it’s not about guns– it’s about drugs, mental health care or lack of it, and other social issues– not one about the chosen instrument. Sadly, if you took away guns for example, such twisted people would seek other means, like arson, improvised explosive devices, knives or other sharp instruments, ball bats, or whatever other instruments that they could find to carry out their sick plans.

Gun control is so bad on so many levels it is not funny.. Look at the rest of the world- and see the effects of gun control in other nations– none of it is good — just turns their citizens into slaves…. The founders of our great country knew this– even way back then– and attempted to ensure a better future– by including what we know as the 2nd Amendment..